By 1968, when Richard Nixon won his first term as president, Grey was the steel company’s general manager of purchasing. In February of that year The Denver Post ran his picture on the business page after he had been appointed vice president of sales for CF&I Steel Corp. based in Denver.

He moved into a luxury home at 3 Sedgwick Drive in Cherry Hills Village, where he lived with his wife and the youngest of his four children, 17-year-old Kathy.

On Oct. 31, 1968, Nixon enjoyed an advantage over Democrat Hubert Humphrey according to the polls in the last week of the election campaign, Grey returned home early from a business trip to spend time with his family in Colorado, and Kathy was answering the door bell for trick-or-treaters.

It was their first Halloween in Colorado.

8:30 p.m.

At around 8:30 p.m. that night, the door bell rang.

Kathy “assumed she would be greeting the usual costumed trick-or-treaters,” an Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Department report says. “Instead she opened the door to a nightmare that would change their lives forever.”

When Kathy opened the door two men shoved their way into the home, then-Sheriff Roy Vogt told former Denver Post staff writer Bernard Beckwith.

The last day of his life, Sean France drove some close friends to a Glendale nightclub to meet another friend.

But shortly after he drove into the parking lot of Al’s Palace on the 4400 block of Leetsdale someone fired four shots into his car. One of the bullets struck him in the head and killed him. France left behind a wife and two young children. He was only 24.

His murder may have been the result of a random rage incident involving a man who had just been thrown out of the nightclub.

France had never been involved in gangs or gotten into trouble. He was the last person you would expect to be the victim of a homicide, said his ex-wife, Tracy Snell, 42, who has since remarried and lives in Atlanta.

“He was a good guy,” said Sgt. Jim Bang of the Glendale Police Department.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.